Watch This Movie

The fourth film in the “Transformers” series, an at least
partial “reboot” as they call it, because although it’s part of a continuity it
dispenses with all the characters from the previous films (and hasn’t it been
lovely seeing the good use to which Shia LaBoeuf has been putting his resultant
free time) is a spectacular visual and aural experience. It is abundant in the
most sophisticated visual effects that the movie industry has to offer,
rendering in precisely-engineered 3D all manner of ingeniously designed
organic, mechanic, mutated imaginary creatures enacting breakneck action and wreaking
large-scale mayhem with relentless impact. And it’s not just the effects that
impress: the simulated physical action choreographed and enacted by what must
have been legions of stunt people, ranging from Western-style punch-em-outs to
martial arts kicks and chops to parkour-style rooftop leaping is clearly
executed with conviction and precision, although it is often shot and edited in
the style (called “chaos cinema” by some) that renders a lot of what transpires
in a kinetic blur. In terms of the technical stuff, the only really crap thing
in “Transformers: Age Of Extinction” is the music. Not even the score, really,
but rather this one whiny song that comes up every now and then at climactic
moments. (Of which there are several.) It might even be one or two different songs, but whatever they are,
they sound like indifferent Journey knockoffs and aren’t up to what the rest of
the movie delivers.

Of course, like ALMOST every other movie reviewer, I'm not convinced that a two-hour-and-forty minute toy commercial elaborately disguising itself as a movie is something to celebrate. Hence, I'm obliged to point out that all this moviemaking expertise is put in the service of a sci-fi concept that is, for lack of a better word, infantile. The movie takes place a couple of years after the end of 2011’s “Transformers:
Dark of the Moon,” but there have been some changes made; despite the
alien-robot-truck-thingies having saved the world, the U.S. government is now
against all bots because they wrecked Chicago in the process, so now we’ve got
Kelsey Grammer as a secretive C.I.A. powerhouse doing a purge on all
Transformers—OR IS HE? (There’s a high-tech company run by unctuous Stanley
Tucci that may be in on the scheme in a way that will not be unguessable by
those with a slight familiarity with Hollywood paranoia tropes.) Then there’s
Mark Wahlberg’s hapless Texas inventor/handyman, a widower with a very
attractive teenage daughter (I guess the fact that director Michael Bay shifted
his obligatory jailbait model role—here it goes to one Nicola Peltz, who might
someday get to play the lead in “The Tara Reid Story” if she plays her cards
right—from girlfriend to hero-daughter is a sign of maturity?) who
inadvertently ends up with Transformer leader Optimus Prime in his garage. The
remainder of the narrative is both mind-numbingly convoluted and almost
shockingly slack—there’s a moment near the movie’s fifth or sixth action climax
set piece that finds Grammer wandering around a Hong Kong pier area and if you
read his lips carefully you’ll see he’s saying “What the hell am I doing STILL
in this movie?”

Screenwriter Ehren Kruger’s latest additions to the
Transformer, ahem, mythology include yet another metallic-looking alien race
trolling around Earth’s lower atmosphere in a modular spaceship whose interiors
look like something the Quay Brothers would come up with if they were big into
meth. There’s also a what-killed-the-dinosaurs prologue that kind of plays
like “ ‘Prometheus’ For Dummies” (yes, I know many of you think "Prometheus" itself was already for dummies, but trust me) and pays off in the third or
fourth action climax set piece with some fascinating new creatures whose
cavalry-to-the-rescue charge down an Asian hill seems nonetheless anticlimactic
anyway. The poker-faced way that various and sundry of the cast reflect on the
idea that Transformers have “souls” and that this is why humans should be
allied with them, is rather confounding; do the filmmakers actually believe in
this idea enough to want its audience to believe it, or are they just being
unbelievably cynical, and which would be worse if true? Not that the movie
gives you much time to think about it. But since it doesn’t give you much time
to think about it, why bring up the issue at all? Like I said. Confounding. But
not without its thrills. As I’ve said.

Rather than proselytize for or against this motion picture
experience—my star rating is as close as I can come to an objective assessment,
and I reckon pretty much everybody reading this—especially this far!—made up
his or her mind about whether they’re going to see this some time ago, I shall
close with two quotes. The first is from the New Testament’s Book of
Corinthians: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child,
I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” The
second is from the song “Kalamazoo,” by the group Luna, its lyrics by Dean
Wareham: “If the war is over/and the monsters have won/if the war is over/I’m
gonna have some fun.”

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